Film Commentary by Alex Good

Daily Archives: May 27, 2018

*. Along with a lot of other people (albeit not so many French film critics) I was pretty much blown away by Nikita when it first came out. What surprised me on this latest re-watch is how it hasn’t missed a beat despite having had many imitators, including a remake (Point of No Return) and a television series.
*. A less happy reflection is that despite all of his promise on display here, Luc Besson never came through. From what I’ve seen, Nikita may still be his best movie.
*. Obviously he’s infatuated with the character of the Manic Pixie Asskicker, his main protagonist, but I still prefer Anne Parillaud to Milla Jovovich or Scarlett Johansson in this role. And while he would go on to work with much bigger budgets I think Nikita manages to do more with less.
*. I mentioned that French critics weren’t as thrilled by Nikita, which may have something to do with Besson being hailed as Mr. Hollywood. I don’t know how fair that is. Nikita is a genre movie and Hollywood does define genres, so there’s that. Even Hong Kong action films were “Hollywood” to a large extent. But Besson does have a signature style even working within genre conventions. I mean, Point of No Return is, at least until the very end, a very close re-working of the same material and compared to Nikita it’s just dead.

*. One of the things that impresses me about Nikita is how stripped-down it is. A movie like this could have spent forever dealing with Nikita’s personal history and training, but Besson knew this was immaterial, inessential. So his heroine has her past erased and her training is foreshortened to the point where it seems almost comic. She’s already a master of the martial arts and is handy with a gun, which is simply given to her seemingly on Day One. Of course it isn’t Day One — her leg, for one thing, has had time to heal — but it seems like her training has just begun.
*. The other thing that stands out is the sense of style I mentioned earlier. It’s style employed with intelligence and restraint. There’s nothing over-the-top about Nikita, and I especially love how assured Besson was to run that whole hotel scene and not have any payoff. The American version was not so confident.
*. Anne Parillaud is great as the tough-but-vulnerable action hero and you couldn’t go wrong with this supporting cast. Tchéky Karyo is an actor I always enjoy watching. Jeanne Moreau is class, and Jean Leon is Victor the clean-up guy, a performance so good they had to bring him back. Who can forget that tub scene?
*. In his review Roger Ebert references the Pygmalion story (one “for our own violent times”) but I was thinking of Vertigo. Either way it’s part of that male fantasy of molding the perfect woman (or weapon) to your own specs. It’s a nice touch to have the two men abandoned at the end wondering what happened. Maybe Nikita was just a dream.
*. This is one of the best action films of the ’90s, but like I said earlier Besson never really built on it. I find this very hard to understand. Yes, he made some other good movies but there was so much promise here that was left unfulfilled. Why was it such a creative dead end?